Nice. I used to sink many hours into FreeCiv. More recently, whenever I tried it, the AI was much too bloodthirsty, with no way I found to tone it down. Basically I'd like to do some nice casual civilization building, but whenever I made contact with others, they would immediately become hostile and steamroll me. Maybe it's time to check this out again.
I played on easy for some rounds - and no KI was hostile to me.
Until some freaking neutral swiss diplomat initiated a unrest in one of my cities and basically stole the city from me.
For me, this was the case even about years ago. Somehow I could never enjoy FreeCiv like I did Civilization. At the time, the only realistic way to win FreeCiv was to follow a very narrow strategy.
The FreeCiv project itself deserves a shoutout here. [0]
Roughly a year ago I tried out the various FreeCiv desktop clients for Windows. I found the Qt one to be easily the best of them, although it was by no means well polished. Could be that the web client is the best choice.
Hoping this does wonders for the FreeCiv feature release cycle and engage frondend devs obsessed with good UI/UX. Will support for sure. I fantasize about one very big civ game that lasts forever a la EVE Online.
I just want to say I love all the games mentioned in this thread. So many of the games I loved as a kid are no longer accessible but freeciv and the like are fun to play and are an exciting sign of more open games to come.
Play by email is also great for enjoying games with people who suffer from serious analysis paralysis. These people are unbearable to game with at the tabletop but really take advantage of the extra time afforded by async gaming to make for some deep games.
It seems like some games (Diplomacy in particular) should almost explicitly encourage the medium of mail rather than table top play.
